Tag Archives: animation

I came across the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Stories on Screen competition and forwarded the details to the Early Years Leading Teacher, also the early years ICT leader. She expressed an interest in participating this year with the younger students creating stop-motion animations inspired by children’s books.

In the past couple of years the school has been purchasing iPads to be used at school. At this stage, the younger years are using the iPads and grade five/six students have helped with reviewing some apps for education. However, they havent been satisfied with any of the stop motion apps. As a consequence I decided to investigate apps for iPads with a focus on creating animations and films. I located a few stopmotion apps and identified Stop Motion Studio to investigate along with the iMovie app.

The aim was to determine:

Key features of the app and how to use it.

How easy the app was to use by younger children

In this activity I downloaded Stop Motion Studio, iMovie and Extras4iMovie to my iPad. I then asked two children (my daughters) if they would like to create animations with paper cut-outs. They were both very keen on the idea of creating animations. The process of planning and animating happened over a weekend. My involvement in their planning stage was minimal. Basically they showed me their cut-outs and asked me what I thought. Sometimes I suggested some more elements may be needed.

On the second day, my involvement was geared towards setting up the iPad to capture the stop motion clips. We did not have a iPad mount to firmly position the iPad to a tripod. Consequently, gaffer tape was used to hold the iPad in place on top of a silver case, on top of a table. The paper elements were on a black cloth on the floor. Little LED lights provided the lighting source.

Once this was set up, each child continued without any assistance. They were able to work out how to use the app without many instructions and even taught me some of the features such as the scrolling back and forth to see the overlay of the animation image.

The animation process took a while involving constant movement between the iPad to shoot frames and the paper elements to change them as part of the frame by frame capture process. They completed the animation with Stop Motion Studio but are yet to edit the final animations in iMovie. They photographed close ups of elements that will need to be edited into the the animation along with the final sound and titles sequence.

During the process, I documented with my iPhone by filming and photographing. I then edited the documented photos and clips with the animations the children made using the iMovie app on an iPad. The titles were created with Extras4iMovie. This video forms the app review that was exported to Youtube and subsequently embedded in this post. By creating this video I was able to test the iMovie app in the process.

This week I will be sharing this review with the school in support of the initiative to use iPads to create animations and films for the CBCA competition and for future projects. Being able to identify the information, curriculum and technology needs is an incredibly important function of a librarian in a school. With this activity, I have been able to provide curriculum resource ideas and support with technology to enable successful outcomes. By working with the children to assess ease of use, I am focussing the needs to the target group and this is very important.

What I learnt is that you definitely need an iPad mount to enable an effective and steady support for the iPad. This will make filming and animation easier. I discovered the app is a fantastic app for the targeted age group and feel confident in transferring these ideas to the teaching and learning community. In working with children to assess the app, it is much easier to demonstrate the ease of use by the target audience.

The next stage involves working through the editing process with the iMovie app and assessing how easy post-production is for the target audience.

I am still playing around with Go animate and created the following inspired by the PLUS model for information literacy by James Herring. I am still not able to embed the animation here but the link below will take you to the animation.

Apologies to James Herring for the error in using ‘evaluation’ in place of ‘self-evaluation’. This is a very simplistic presentation of the model and does not take into consideration the scope of the Herring PLUS Model (please visit the link for more information). Nor does the animation allude to the malleability of the model in its ability to revisit steps in the information literacy process. Herring, on the websites linked, calls his model ‘iterative’ in this ability to move around the information literacy process. This is an important aspect as it hands over ownership to the student or user in devising a process that enables them to work in a way that is meaningful to them. This would certainly lead to greater engagement and transference of skills as ‘users’ can adapt the process to suit them as they become more confident with use.

With Go animate, I am experimenting with the use of simple animation as a tool for information delivery in library spaces. Hopefully, the use of simple animation may prove a door via the web for students to come to the library and ‘ask a librarian’. This is only one tool available there are many more out there that are certainly worth exploring in our quest to make the library more visible, accessable and ‘fun’ for students today.

I have just discovered Go animate it is a web based program where you can create your own animations or comic strips. The one that follows is a brief animation I made as a way of testing and evaluating the program. It is a pretty straight forward program and when you start it begins with a basic tutorial to get you going. It’s a breeze!

I didn’t do anything fancy. I just wanted to test it out and then share! Unfortunately I still need to work out how to embed the animation for free so it appears here like other videos. At present, I can only do this by posting the animation to youtube. However, in order to be able to do this Go animate will need to be upgraded for a fee. Ho hum…